Introduction
For a long time I have wanted to build a "volumetric" three-dimensional display - one where the image takes up a real volume, rather than being an optical illusion on a flat plane. Conventional 3d displays have a number of disadvantages, all of which are overcome with a volumetric display:
While at MIT for the academic year 2005-2006, I took the class 6.111: Introductory Digital Systems Lab (or "Digital Death" as it is affectionately known!). For the final project of this class, we had to do something interesting with a Xilinx Virtex2 FPGA on an amazing development board. A few weeks earlier I had seen James Clar's LED cube - so, naturally, I persuaded my lab partner that we should build one of those!
Thus, from October to December 2005 the two of us built an 8x8x8-voxel (volumetric pixel) cube of red LEDs and wrote the controller for it in Verilog. We succeeded in implementing all our aims for the project, and even won a prize at the HKN Project Expo in January 2006 (the Student's Choice for Coolest Project). It has also been featured on Hacked Gadgets.
More details
You may also be interested to see the final report we wrote on the project (3.9Mb PDF).
Extensions and improvements for our display
LED cubes elsewhere on the Internet
People, companies, software